A Sokoban That Warmed Our Hearts
I have an allergy to sokoban games, which makes me a reckless choice to review Cute Bonfire. It’s mostly a fatigue thing: I’ve pushed enough boxes for one lifetime, and I’m dubious that anyone could do anything new with the genre.
Serves me right for not researching Cute Bonfire before volunteering for it. I must have assumed it was a platformer, probably with a neat arson mechanic. But no: it’s a sokoban game, and now I have to be professional and objective, which I don’t like doing at the best of times.
Thank you, then, Cute Bonfire, for being a rather lovely sokoban. You’re one of the good ones. I could very easily have been lumped with completing a personal nightmare over Christmas, but instead you were a highlight.
It Only Needs One Match To Burn A Thousand Trees
Cute Bonfire is really rather elegant. It doesn’t do much that’s new: all of its puzzles involve the simple nudging around of spherical, purple flints. All of the sokoban rules apply: if you push a flint into a wall or corner then you’re stuffed. Much of the puzzle is about manoeuvring the flint around without getting it stuck. The goal is to reach a log pile. The flint and kindling combine to create a baby bonfire and your job is done.
The elegance comes from how this is expanded upon. Later levels have multiple log piles and multiple flints. There’s no colour-matching here: you can make any combination of fires, and as long as they all end up lit at some point then you’re golden. Often, the puzzle of Cute Bonfire is determining which flint is intended for which fire.
A flint can be moved into a fire but also out, which is the second simple expansion. You can treat a log pile as a step towards a destination rather than the destination itself. It’s not particularly new, but it adds nuance to the puzzles when you have several flints and potential fires, and the goal is yet another space to work with.
These incremental additions to the sokoban formula get amplified by some above-par puzzle design. From level 14 onwards, Cute Bonfire is a real bastard. Don’t let the cuteness fool you. The designers have a fine handle on how to carve fiendish puzzles out of tiny play areas. It’s impressive what they can do with a few squares and blocks.
I’ve Got A Fire In My Heart For You
Cute Bonfire got so challenging that we ended up bemoaning the lack of a guide. The internet failed us: the only YouTube videos were achievement guides, which stopped halfway through the game (Cute Bonfire dishes out a humungous 2000G for ten minutes of play). We wanted help with the last ten of the forty levels, dammit! There was certainly no in-game hint system to help us through. We had to use brainpower and natural ability, which was in short supply.
The thing is, I actually wanted to complete Cute Bonfire. I can’t understate how much of an achievement that is: I deeply dislike sokoban games. But there’s an alchemy in the cute visuals (aw, the sheer cheerfulness of the baby fires), the compact level designs and the bullet-hard difficulty of the layouts that meant we considered – for a moment – changing our opinion about the genre.
The Fire In Our Heart Is Out
We’re prioritising the positives, mostly because we were taken aback. We just wanted to laud the good stuff first. Cute Bonfire is not actually perfect, and that’s mostly down to a lack of ambition.
It’s the other side of that elegance coin. Cute Bonfire opts for simplicity, but there came a point when we hankered for something new to deal with. The number of flints increased, the number of log piles too, but very little changed beyond that. We couldn’t help feeling that there was room for some additional complexity which never quite arrived. Cute Bonfire verges on slimline when you look back over the 40 levels.
And without a hint system or a means of skipping levels, it’s easy to get into a logjam. The difficulty is set quite high, and we found ourselves butting heads against the same levels for long periods of time. There isn’t an ‘out’ for stuck players. We can imagine people giving up at points, and they’d be well within their rights.
Goodness Gracious, Great Balls Of Fire
All in all, though, Cute Bonfire is a good sokoban game. That sounds like an oxymoron to my ears, as sokoban games mostly suck. Not sucking is a special achievement. I dallied with adding a half-mark just because it broke my sokoban duck.
But while it’s elegant, Cute Bonfire could have done with an eccentricity or two. The puzzles sparkle with good design, but that sparkle dulls after forty levels of the same flints, fires and blocks.
If you have a fire in your heart for sokoban games, then Cute Bonfire might just be a must-play. If you’re as disinterested in them as I am, Cute Bonfire might surprise you by not being guff. It’s more of a recommendation than it might sound.
Important Links
Cute Bonfire is Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/cute-bonfire-xbox-series/9nsf7rmg3xc1
And there’s an Xbox One version too – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/cute-bonfire-xbox-one/9mxgvpz45nc6
As well as a Windows PC edition – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/cute-bonfire-windows/9nl4z7gklwww
